A US first in stock exchange industry for Australian surveillance technology

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 04 March 2009 09:21

IT Industry - Strategy

The Australian SMARTS Group, a global provider of market surveillance technology, has completed its first installation in the US stock exchange industry, with the installation of its Integrity Platform on the BATS Exchange, America’s third largest exchange.

Dr Michael Aitken, founder and chairman of SMARTS Group, said the BATS Exchange turned over approximately 12% of all US equities traded daily, and the installation presented a challenge because of the extreme performance requirements of the BATS exchange.

Aitken said the SMARTS Integrity Platform had been developed in Australia and, he claimed, it was the most advanced and most widely used market surveillance technology.

“We are now analysing in real-time over one billion messages per day from BATS’ high speed trading engine. BATS is the first exchange in the US to adopt SMARTS’ surveillance technology, and the 39th worldwide.”

According to Aitken, the SMARTS Integrity Platform is the international financial community’s preferred platform of real-time systems for market surveillance, market supervision, and market compliance and SMARTS was delivering the surveillance technology necessary for BATS to fulfill its regulatory monitoring obligations as a listed US exchange.
 
“The implementation has established the capabilities of the next generation for the SMARTS software platform. We are looking forward to scaling our solution to the increasing requirements of global equity markets and to implementing more projects in the US with its dynamic and exciting financial marketplace where we can have real impact.”
 
Aitken says SMARTS has more than 40 national exchange and regulatory customers, as well as brokers, in 30 countries with its Integrity Platform installed as an integrated system on exchanges to monitor orders, trades and quotes to identify market violations including market manipulation, insider trading and other violations of stock market regulations and legislative requirements.